A Team of Engineers, a Hardy Robot, the Moon

A day in the life of a Carnegie Mellon robotics team-and its lunar rover

MOON SHOT: Engineers from Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, are developing a remote-controlled rover that they plan to send to the moon in late 2010. They are members of the Astrobotic team, one of the competitors vying for the US $20 million first prize in the Google Lunar X Prize competition. <

Photo: Bill Cramer/Wonderful Machine

TEST DRIVE: The Carnegie Mellon group is conducting field tests on the grounds of a former steel mill a few kilometers from campus—a “little moon on Earth,” as team members call it. The site has large fields with craters where the team drives the rover around to test its mobility. <

Photo: Bill Cramer/Wonderful Machine

UNDER THE HOOD: Field-test engineers Charlie Munoz [left] and Ethan Minogue remove the rover’s main cover to inspect its electronics. The current prototype uses mostly off-the-shelf hardware, including a PC-based system to control its two mast-mounted cameras. <

Photo: Bill Cramer/Wonderful Machine

HARDY HARDWARE: A future version of the rover will be upgraded to space-rated systems. These will include high-efficiency solar cells, lithium-ion-phosphate batteries, and radiation-hardened computers. <

ROCK ’N’ ROLL: The rover has four metal-mesh wheels and a suspension system in a configuration known as rocker-bogie, which has no axles or springs. The mechanism—used on NASA’s Mars rovers—is ideal to climb over large obstacles. <

Photo: Bill Cramer/Wonderful Machine

IN CONTROL: Ross Finman, an undergraduate who leads the field tests, uses a control interface on a laptop to operate the robot from a building nearby. In upcoming experiments, the engineers plan to drive the robot around the test site while sitting at their lab on the Carnegie Mellon campus. <

Photo: Bill Cramer/Wonderful Machine

MEN AND MACHINE: Astrobotic team members [from left] Nisarg Kothari, James Lee, Ross Finman [foreground], Ethan Minogue, and Charlie Munoz gather for a test run of the rover. The plan is to go through several design iterations, evaluating prototypes until the final rover emerges. <

Photo: Bill Cramer/Wonderful Machine

CHILLING: Responsible for the rover’s thermal design, Erika Bannon holds a cold plate used in heat-dissipation tests. To cool its computers and solar cells, the rover will use radiators and carbon plates optimized to emanate infrared energy into space. <

Photo: John Fleck/Carnegie Mellon University

ENGINEER IN CHIEF: The Astrobotic team is led by William “Red” Whittaker, a renowned Carnegie Mellon engineer whose robots have explored ice fields, deserts, and volcanoes. Getting one to the moon is a feat he intends to pull off “without raising a heartbeat.”